er shipped rather than on copies of MS-DOS shipped; * Imposing minimum quantity commitments on manufacturers; * Signing contracts for greater than one year; * Tying the sale of MS_DOS to the sale of other Microsoft products;(Maldoom 1)Although these penalties look to put an end to all of Microsofts evilpractices, some people think that they are not harsh enough and that Microsoftshould have been split up to put a stop to any chance of them forming a truemonopoly of the operating system market and of the entire software market.On one side of the issue, there are the people who feel that Microsoft shouldbe left alone, at least for the time being. I am one of these people, feelingthat Microsoft does more good than bad, thus not necessitating their breakup. Ifeel this way for many reasons, and until Microsoft does something terriblywrong or illegal, my opinion will stay this way.First and foremost, Microsoft sets standards for the rest of the industry tofollow.Jesse Berst, editorial director of Windows Watcher newsletter out of Redmond,Washington, and the executive director of the Windows Solutions Conference,says it best with this statement: "To use a railroad analogy, Microsoft buildsthe tracks on which the rest of the industry ships its products." ("WhyMicrosoft (Mostly) Shouldnt Be Stopped."4) With Microsoft creating the standards for the rest of the computer industry,they are able to create better standards and build them much faster than if anoutside organization or committee were to create them. With these standardsset, other companies are able to create their applications and other productsthat much faster, and better, and thus the customers receive that much betterof a product.Take for instance the current effort to develop the Digital Video Disc (DVD)standard. DVDs are compact discs that are capable of storing 4900 megabytes ofinformation as apposed to the 650 megabytes that can be stored on a CD-ROM discnow.For this reason,...
